Investors and Crops
For the last few years, every time a hurricane strikes the US, we've been treated to yet another round of, "What about THIS one? Is THIS hurricane a sign of global warming? Not exactly? What Crap!" Every time they're trotted out to answer for the latest natural disaster, climate scientists always make the point that global warming makes all of our weather more extreme, which means more intense and frequent hurricanes AND more intense and frequent floods AND more intense and frequent droughts. This always seems to be greeted by the mass media as a weak argument on the part of a mealy-mouthed academic, since it's not contributing to their black-and-white, sensationalist pursuit of higher ratings.
The problem is that any number of strategies can be deployed to deal with consistently different weather patterns, like more or less rain, higher or lower temperatures. We're good at dealing with these sorts of longer-term changes. Where we and our agricultural practices fall flat on our faces is when we can't depend on the weather, at least to some minimal degree. Events like the year without a summer throw a major monkeywrench into our agriculture, and in more prolonged events, our survival. The point that the media misses with respect to hurricanes and global warming, is that high temperatures are not the enemy here; weather volatility is.
I'm reminded of all this as I watch the Dow Jones in the midst of the current banking meltdown. I'm also reminded that some of the biggest single-day gains of the past in various stock market indices took place during the Great Depression. Here again, we see that where a good, old-fashioned recession simply means tightening our belts and making different plans, this sort of meltdown brings with it a level of market volatility that - everyone seems to agree - makes it virtually impossible to effectively plan for the future. Since much of our economy runs on confidence and expectations for the future, a prolonged event like this would seem to have equally dire potential for the survival of our lifestyles. For example, Iceland has already flirted with national bankruptcy as it attempts to weather this storm.
The business community and the media seem to have no problem understanding how this economic volatility threatens our way of life; so why can't they understand that climatic volatility poses a similar - if far, far worse - threat?